On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry Read Online Free PDF Page A

aching,
    Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice, Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
    Undulating into the willing and yielding day, Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day.
    Poets who would never meter their stick or brag of their balls; who would never vulgarly vaunt of their lady's vaginal grip or be publicly proud of her corpulent tits, succumb to the menace of measurement. Rossetti, while he kisses, counts.
    Her arms lie open, throbbing with their throng Of confluent pulses, bare and fair and strong: And her deep-freighted lips expect me now Amid the clustering hair that shrines her brow Five kisses broad, her neck ten kisses long . . .
    Lately, Yeats approached the problem, and Pound had occasional success, the most notable, I suppose, this passage from Canto XXXIX:
    Desolate is the roof where the cat sat, Desolate is the iron rail that he walked And the corner post whence he greeted the sunrise.
    In hill path: 'thkk, thgk'
    of the loom
    'Thgk, thkk' and the sharp sound of a song under olives
    When I lav in the ingle of Circe
    I heard a song of that kind.
    Fat panther lay by me
    Girls talked there of fucking, beasts talked there of eating,
    All heavy with sleep, fucked girls and fat leopards, Lions loggy with Circe's tisane.
    Girls leery with Circe's tisane . . .
    Lovely as this is, the rest of his frankness is in Latin and Greek.
    No, they are not well-enough loved, and the wise writer watches himself, for with so much hate inside them—in 'bang,5
    in 'screw," in 'prick,' in 'piece,' in 'hump'—how can he be sure he has not been infected—by 'slit,' by 'gash'—and his skills, supreme while he's discreet, will not fail him? Not an enterprise for amateurs. Even the best are betrayed. Lawrence is perhaps the saddest example.

    * * *
There's the blue skin of cold, contusion, sickness, fear . . . absent air, morbidity, the venereals, blue pox . . . gloom . . .
    There are whole schools offish, clamps of trees, flocks of birds, bouquets of flowers: blue channel cats, the ash, beech, birch, bluegills, breams, and bass, Andalusian fowl, acaras, angels in decorative tanks, the bluebill, bluecap, and blue billy (a petrel of the southern seas), anemone, bindweed, bur, bell, mullet, salmon, trout, cod, daisy, and a blue leaved and flowered mountain plant called the blue beardtongue because of its conspicuous yellow-bearded sterile stamens.

    The mad, as we choose to speak of others who do not share our tastes, provide cases galore of color displacement: they think pink is blue, that brown is blue, that sounds are blue, that over-shoes are condoms, and we have only to describe these crazies directly and they will smuggle the subject in all by themselves.
    Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented room. The techniques, in any case, are similar.
    Here is Thick, in The Lime Twig of John Hawkes, beating Margaret:
    'I've beat girls before,' whispering, holding the truncheon in the dark, bracing himself with one fat hand against the wall, 'and I don't leave bruises And if I happened to be without my weapon
    . . . the next best thing is a newspaper rolled and soaking wet. But here, get the feel of it, Miss.' He reached down for her and she felt the truncheon nudging against her thigh, gently, like a man's cane in a crpwd.
    'It ain't so bad,' he whispered.
    She was lying face up and hardly trembling, not offering to pull her leg away. The position she was tied in made her think of exercises she had heard were good for the figure. She smelled gun oil—
    the men who visited the room had guns—and a sour odor inside the mattress. . . . There was a shadow on the wall like a rocking chair; her fingers were going to sleep; she thought that a wet newspaper would be